Birds that I Missed - A Lamentation with a Poem at the End

By Mel Carriere

I didn't really start seriously paying attention to birds until 1999, when I was 35 years old, and by that time I had already missed dozens of great opportunities to lay eyes upon unique and beautiful avian life forms and then reduce them to satisfying little check marks on my life list.  Now I really don't have the resources to travel too much, so I often kick myself thinking back about the things I could have seen had I just taken my nose out of book for a little while and looked around me.

When I first joined the Navy in 1983 I was stationed in Northern Illinois and then the Virginia Beach area, so there is no telling how many birds of the Midwest and Eastern States I could have captured and locked up in my little Pokemon birding ball.  There were great unbroken stands of deciduous woods around the Damnek Naval Training Station at that time, and I tremble with regret when I think of the untapped avian marvels I left behind in these thick forests and surrounding swamps.

It seems like all of these stories are going to be from my Navy experience, because that was the only time that I traveled far and wide outside of the continental United States.  And it was the travelling itself that presented the greatest opportunity to observe birds that not many people, not even very serious birders, get many chances to see.  I went on three six month long Westpac cruises in the Navy covering thousands of miles of ocean, and any number of local operations where we spent days and weeks playing war games in the Pacific well out of sight from the shoreline of San Diego.  But at that time I didn't even know what a "pelagic" bird was and I definitely had never seen one.  Truth is I probably had seen thousands but they never registered in my mind.

I do recall seeing birds that would follow our ship across the Pacific on our long voyages, but I assumed they were just seagulls.  Hell, they looked like seagulls, and I since I didn't know anything about Tubenoses or convergent evolution at the time, that's just what they remained for me for a couple dozen years.  Retrieving this memory from the dusty scrap heap I recall that these "gulls" were rather grayish in color, so I assume they were Fulmars.  I didn't see another Fulmar until 2007, on a whale watching expedition that I had to pay for.

Back in those cheery good old days of the US Navy when we ran over whales and polluted the ocean without a second thought and without regret, we still dumped our trash and garbage "clear the stern," on a near daily basis.  I look back regretfully at the mass "seagull" fests that would gather at these free ocean smorgasbords.  Had I been on the lookout for pelagic species at the time I don't think there would have been a single Procellariiforme that would have been able to elude the dangling snare of my life list.

Perhaps my biggest birding regret comes from my two trips to Australia, where I was too busy drinking Emu lager and chasing birds of the human female persuasion to give a second thought to the feathered variety.  Now I see Facebook photos from Australian birders of parrots, parakeets, and little marvels called fairy wrens that have extraordinarily colored plumage, but what good do they do me?  I was literally on that boat for four years, travelling hither and yon to the four points of the compass, but I figuratively missed the boat completely when it came to birds.

There was one bird that I did manage to lock in my mental cage and bring back with me, and I still guard it jealousy and possessively, even though its raucous chattering sometimes keeps me up at night.  This was the Galah, a pink and gray Cockatoo that swarms across the beautiful green rolling hills of Western Australia in flocks of hundreds of birds.  I managed to capture this one bird, this one among hundreds of potential species that I thoughtlessly skipped, because my shipmates and I had rented a car and driven out into the countryside.  This is probably not a good idea when you are full of Emu lager and you have to drive on the wrong side of the road, and as could be expected at some point we had to pull over on a road in some beautiful farm country to respond to a call of nature.

As we looked on in complete awe, up above us on a wire several dozen, perhaps hundreds of Galahs had perched in voyeuristic fashion to observe the proceedings.  All of us having grown up in the US, where farm country birds are typically very drab, we were not at all accustomed to these brilliantly pink birds gathered in audience above us.  I think this spectacle of three or four Yanks peeing in the dirt for the amusement of parrots made an indelible procession in our memories forever.

The Galahs in their thousands still mock me every time I go the bathroom, seeming to say "You were there and you could have seen a lot of better birds than us!  What the hell were you thinking?"

Therefore, in an attempt to put the Galah ghosts to rest I have composed a little poem.  It contains subtle references to urination, so keep the kids out of the room:


Birds that I missed
Boy am I pissed
Tubenoses at sea
Were ignored by me
Australian wonders
Were birdwatching blunders
The Galahs conspire
To mock me from a wire

Birds that I missed
I'll forever insist
With your nose in a book
You should turn up and look
Or you'll get no surprise
From winged joys in the skies
And forever regret
The checkmarks you don't get


This photo of scores of mocking Galahs on a wire taken from the Graeme Chapman collection.  Visit his extraordinary Website here

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